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1 8 4 I n t e r p r e t a t i o n Volume 41 / Issue 2in holding that the forms or species are real entities—all three are ‘realists,’as modern philosophical terminology has it,” considering species or kindsas “templates according to which nature is organized” (28). Led by Williamof Ockham, the realists’ opponents, the “nominalists,” maintain that formshave no status “out there”; they “are concepts by which we organize ourexperience,” with “no existence outside of our minds” (28). Our only wayto perceive the world outside our minds is sense perception of particularobjects; therefore, Aristotelian/Thomistic formal causation is unnecessary tounderstanding nature. If nature is in fact directed by a final cause, Ockhamaccepts this “only as an article of faith,” not as a result of “natural reason”(30). What replaces the forms for Ockham is the divine will, a will unconstrainedby forms, templates; to think otherwise, as Aquinas does, amountsto a sort of sacrilege—the theological equivalent of a restraining order onGod’s freedom. “True knowledge such as God has, is knowledge of each andevery particular, in its particularity”—of every sparrow that falls, of everyhair on every head (31). The human resort to universals betrays the weaknessof our minds, their finitude; while in our feebleness we need such concepts,they do not convey reality as God created it.This leads Ockham to distinguish between God’s ordinate power andGod’s absolute power. “God’s absolute power consists in the fact that he wasfree to create the world in radically different ways”; but once He decided uponcreating this world he manifested his “ordinate” power, “remaining withinthe ambit of this created order” (33). This is why Ockham himself relies onspecies (although as mere concepts) to describe the world as God has establishedit. The world “remains somewhat conditional,” dependent on God’scontinued will to keep it the way it is (33). Jewish and Christian faith entailsour acknowledgment of this dependency. Moral law is the same way: “In thiscreation…God has condemned adultery and murder, and commanded loveof himself,” but in some other creation He might not have done so. We needdivine revelation of His moral law for that reason, inasmuch as we cannotknow God’s reason or reasons for setting it down the way He did. However, inconsidering God’s creation as “grounded in God’s ordinate power,” we may“arrive at some understanding of moral law,” as indeed Aristotle had done,unaided by scripture (34).Nominalism will look quite different if God disappears. Forde offers anilluminating account of the background of Locke’s thought in the Baconianproject. Bacon took over the nominalists’ empiricism but, “unlike them,indeed in complete opposition to their spirit…conceived a sweeping plan forthe mastery of nature by human power, rooted in a new empirical science”